Hi,
My name is Alan, I'm from Ireland and I currently have a small business which makes ornamental garden water mill wheels, please refer to www.irishwaterwheels.com. The various designs for my product are completed on autocad and these are then submitted to a vendor in Donegal (www.urlar.ie) who has a wood lazer cutting equipment that cuts out the designs from Marine Plywood.
However, there are many problems with this process, such as;
1. Firstly, in order to collect the order from the vendor in Donegal is a 7 hour return trip for me. 2. Also, the lazer is of course unable to burn to a depth so cannot cut out slots which I require for my design. 3. The glue used between the laminates causes burning which has a very undesirable effect on the edges of my designs. 4. The process is quite slow and extremely expensive.
Hence, I am looking for alternatives. I can manually cut these designs out via a jigsaw but this is time-consuming and error prone. I have been trying to source other cheaper CNC wood cutting vendors who will meet my needs but it seems they are reluctant to deal with such small orders (perhaps 10 - 20 sheets of Marine Plywood to be cut at a time).
So I am mailing this woodworking forum in an effort to get some feedback, help/advice, comments on other suggested methods/machinery which I could use to cut out such intricate patterns and which would cater for slots. I would be extremely grateful for any helpful information provided.
I was thinking of some type of small CNC cutter but would this be expensive and would it cater for my 4ft Water Wheel design?
Thanks in advance.